SiemensEsri Team Wins Contract for NATO's Core Geographic Services

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has awarded its Core Geographic Services contract to the Siemens Enterprise Communications (SEN)Esri team, which will spearhead a project that will shape the application of geospatial technology in defense for years to come.

The services, technology, and software the contract provides will ensure that all NATO staff, from the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) to NATO's deployable headquarters (HQ), will have the best available geospatial information at all times.

Commanders, analysts, and other NATO network users will fuse geospatial content from Core Geographic Services with other forms of information for command and control, intelligence, and logistics applications. The Core Geographic Services form a key architectural building block in support of NATO's service-oriented architecture (SOA).

Under SEN integration and management, this project brings together Esri's world-leading GIS software with the latest database technology and hardware. Underpinning the system is Esri's ArcGIS Server, which provides services to NATO staff through a Web viewer and to other NATO systems through standard Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC), interfaces. NATO's GIS staff will use Esri's ArcGIS Desktop to conduct complex GIS analysis and data integration. Esri's Job Tracking for ArcGIS (JTX) extension manages and tracks all these GIS workflows and tasks.

NATO's selection process for the contract included a very thorough demonstration phase to ensure that the selected team could meet rigorous technical requirements.

Esri president Jack Dangermond praised NATO for its visionary approach to the project: "In the proposal request, NATO required a GIS with a service-oriented architecture that supported OGC standards. Esri looks forward to providing NATO with advanced, state-of-the-art geospatial technology and working with Siemens Enterprise Communications and OGC to ensure success."